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Printed in the United States of America. This publication is protected by copyright, and permission must be obtained from the publisher prior to any prohibited reproduction, storage in a retrieval system, or transmis- sion in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or likewise. For informa- tion regarding permissions, write to: Pearson Education, Inc. Rights and Contracts Department 501 Boylston Street, Suite 900 Boston, MA 02116 Fax: (617) 671-3447 ISBN-13: 978-0-13-700009-8 ISBN-10: 0-13-700009-X Text printed in the United States on recycled paper at RR Donnelley in Crawfordsville, Indiana. First printing, November 2009 Preface Solaris™ 10 System Administration Essentials Solaris™ 10 System Administration Essentials is the centerpiece of the new series on Solaris system administration. It covers all of the breakthrough features of the Solaris 10 operating system in one place. Other books in the series, such as Solaris™ 10 Security Essentials and Solaris™ 10 ZFS Essentials, cover specific features and aspects of the Solaris OS in detail. Solaris™ 10 System Administration Essentials is the most comprehensive book about Solaris 10 on the market. It covers the significant features introduced with the initial release of Solaris 10 and the features, like ZFS, introduced in subse- quent updates. The Solaris OS has a long history of innovation. The Solaris 10 OS is a water- shed release that includes features such as: Zones/Containers, which provide application isolation and facilitate server consolidation ZFS, the file system that provides a new approach to managing your data with an easy administration interface The Fault Management Architecture, which automates fault detection and resolution xvii xviii Preface The Service Management Facility, a unified model for services and service management on every Solaris system Dynamic Tracing (DTrace), for troubleshooting OS and application prob- lems on production systems in real time The Solaris 10 OS fully supports 32-bit and 64-bit x86 platforms as well as the SPARC architecture. This book is the work of the engineers, architects, and writers who conceptual- ized the services, wrote the procedures, and coded the rich set of Solaris features. These authors bring a wide range of industry and academic experience to the busi- ness of creating and deploying operating systems. These are the people who know Solaris 10 best. They have collaborated to write a book that speaks to readers who want to learn Solaris or who want to use Solaris for the first time in their com- pany’s or their own environment. Readers do not have to be experienced Solaris users or operating system developers to take advantage of this book. The book’s key topics include: Installing, booting, and shutting down a system Managing packages and patches (software updates) Controlling system processes Managing disks and devices Managing users Configuring networks Using printing services Books in the Solaris System Administration Series Solaris™ 10 Security Essentials Solaris™ 10 Security Essentials describes how to make Solaris installations secure and configure the operating system to the particular needs of an environment, whether the systems are on the edge of the Internet or running a data center. It does so in a straightforward way that makes a seemingly arcane subject accessible to system administrators at all levels. Solaris™ 10 Security Essentials begins with two stories that highlight the evolution of security in UNIX systems and the particular strengths that Sun Microsystems has added to the Solaris operating system that make it the best choice for meeting the present-day challenges to robust and secure computing. Preface xix Solaris™ 10 ZFS Essentials Solaris™ 10 ZFS Essentials presents the revolutionary Zettabyte File System introduced in Solaris 10. It is a file system that is elegant in its simplicity and the ease with which it allows system administrators to manage data and storage. ZFS is an all-purpose file system that is built on top of a pool of storage devices. File systems that are created from a storage pool share space with the other file systems in the pool. Administrators do not have to allocate storage space based on the intended size of a file system because file systems grow automatically within the space that is allocated to the storage pool. When new storage devices are added, all file systems in the pool can immediately use the additional space. Intended Audience The books in the Solaris System Administration Series can benefit anyone who wants to learn more about the Solaris 10 operating system. They are written to be particularly accessible to system administrators who are new to Solaris, and people who are perhaps already serving as administrators in companies running Linux, Windows, and/or other UNIX systems. If you are not presently a practicing system administrator but want to become one, then this series, starting with the Solaris™ 10 System Administration Essen- tials, provides an excellent introduction. In fact, most of the examples used in the books are suited to or can be adapted to small learning environments like a home setup. Even before you venture into corporate system administration or deploy Solaris 10 in your existing IT installation, these books will help you experiment in a small test environment. OpenSolaris In June 2005, Sun Microsystems introduced OpenSolaris, a fully functional Solaris operating system release built from open source. While the books in this series focus on Solaris 10, they often incorporate aspects of OpenSolaris. Now that Solaris has been open-sourced, its evolution has accelerated even beyond its nor- mally rapid pace. The authors of this series have often found it interesting to intro- duce features or nuances that are new in OpenSolaris. At the same time, many of the enhancements introduced into OpenSolaris are finding their way into Solaris 10. Whether you are learning Solaris 10 or already have an eye on OpenSolaris, the books in this series are for you. 6 Managing System Processes This chapter discusses all the basic concepts for managing system processes in the Solaris Operating System. It covers: Conditions of a process in Solaris Different states of a process Process context information Different commands and utilities present for monitoring and controlling the system processes in Solaris Process Manager utility for monitoring, controlling, and scheduling the sys- tem processes in Solaris 6.1 Overview The process is one of the fundamental abstractions of Unix. In Unix, every object is represented as either a file or a process. With the introduction of the /proc struc- ture, there has been an effort to represent even processes as files. A process is an instance of a running program or a program in execution. It can be any task that has an address space, executes its own piece of code, and has a unique process ID (PID). A process can create another process called a child process. Any process that creates the child process is called the parent process. This creation of new processes from existing parent processes is called forking (after the C function 141 142 Chapter 6 Managing System Processes called fork()). Most processes in the system are created by fork system calls.